Companies that provide services to customers frequently provide their customers with automated techniques for viewing or managing accounts relating to these services. A service company may, for instance, manage a web site designed to allow its customers to login to the web site and view and/or modify information specific to account(s) maintained with the company.
As an example of such a web site, consider a web portal provided by a telecommunications company for its clients. The telecommunications company may operate a variety of systems and networks, such as legacy systems or networks that were acquired over the years. A particular customer may have a number of different accounts with the company. For example, a customer may be a large corporation with many divisions, each of which may maintain a different account, such as a different long distance or data service account, with the company. Employees in various ones of the divisions may be given different access privileges to the various accounts.
The web portal may provide menus to a customer that include only information or actions that are applicable to the specific account or employee. In one existing web portal, for example, context menus in the web portal, which show actions available to the employee, are generated via script (e.g., JavaScript) that is downloaded with the web page provided by the web portal, where the rules for displaying the context menus are hard-coded into the script. That is, the rules representing valid actions for a particular account are in the user interface downloaded by the customer.